


Some Things Should Just Stay as They Are

by juniperproductions



Category: Dangan Ronpa - All Media Types, Super Dangan Ronpa 2
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-06
Updated: 2019-09-06
Packaged: 2020-10-11 07:42:43
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,217
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20542547
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/juniperproductions/pseuds/juniperproductions
Summary: 7 years after the events of Super Danganronpa 2, Nagito is forced to confront his illnesses.





	Some Things Should Just Stay as They Are

**Some Things Should Just Stay as They Are**

I stare at the ceiling, willing the minutes to pass, but the harder I will them the more reluctant they seemed to escape my notice. Glancing at Hajime beside me, I let out a sigh.

I want to get out of bed, but I just feel… tired. Not tired enough to sleep—in fact, wide awake enough that 3 hours had passed since I lay down next to Hajime, but tired enough that I haven’t left this room in… god knows how many days it’s been.

I really can’t expect much different though. And Hajime keeps telling me he’s worried about me, and that’s why he sleeps in the same room, the same _bed_ even, so he can be here if I need him, but I don’t really understand. He knew this was going to happen.

Still, I shove him and he groggily rolls over to look at me, squinting in the dark. “Yeah? Ko, what’s wrong?”

I don’t know. I don’t know. “Can’t sleep.”

He sighs. “Did you want to try the medication again?”

“No,” I snap, my voice sharp. “I want to get out. But I’m tired.”

He breathes deeply and pushes himself up, reaching over to turn on the bedside lamp. “Where do you want to go?” his voice dull and soft, like he’s whispering for some reason.

“I don’t care,” I say flatly.

“Do you want to go to boardwalk?”

“Don’t care.”

“There’s that part down the road that—”

“Don’t care.”

He purses his lips and closes his eyes for a moment. “What about Mikan? Do you want to see Mikan?”

“No.”

He glances at the clock glowing dimly below the lamp, then adjusts himself as if trying to sit up taller, but still ends up just slumped slightly.

He pauses. “Ko, I meant to ask you…”

“What?” I say gruffly. Not a question, not really. Of course, I want to know, but I don’t want to be asked things. I just want to sleep.

“The pharmacy. About a week ago, after we went down there, they reported a bunch of stuff missing. Bandages, a few laxatives, some multivitamins.” He hesitates, waiting, like I’m going to answer a question he hasn’t asked yet. “It was you, wasn’t it?”

I roll over and turn on the lamp on my side of the bed, and shuffle through the drawer beneath it. I pull out a pack of bandages with little multicolored paw prints on them, three boxes of some brand name pink pill bottles with the phrase _When you gotta’ go but can’t, go with Gonara! _stamped on the side, and a pack of gummy vitamins, tossing them onto the bed. He stares silently, watching, observing.

“Why?”

“I felt like it.”

He shakes his head, probably without thinking. Not that I know what he’s thinking anymore. I hardly know what I’m thinking most of the time. That’s what’s frustrating about me, according to Souda.

“Have you been taking the medications Mikan prescribed?”

I sigh, getting frustrated. I lift the covers and swing my legs out, letting my feet land on the cold linoleum, and push myself out of the bed, stating to pace. “Sometimes, I guess. Can we please just go?”

“Sometimes?” he heaves, his voice getting hotter and more course. “What does that mean, Ko? You occasionally miss a dose of you occasionally remember one?”

“It’s probably somewhere in the middle.”

He rubs his eyes with his fingers, then flattens his palm to his forehead and pushes back his hair. We both sit for a moment, staring somewhere off away from each other. Finally, he breaks the silence, his voice less tumultuous than it was before. “Let’s go to the park. Get your jacket.”

He doesn’t wait for me to do it, instead getting out of bed and tossing it to me from the back of the chair where it was draped. I walk over to him, where he is tying his laces.

“Put on your shoes, Ko.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Please?” His voice rises a little, insisting. When I don’t move, he just stands up, opens the door, and we walk into the hallway together. My room is pretty deep within the facility, so we have to walk past most of the other dorms, the storage rooms, the medical rooms, the pharmacy, and the offices to get to the nearest door. We take this walk in silence, the sound of my feet sticking slightly to the floor accompanied by Hajime’s slightly louder thudding steps next to mine.

The compound is surprisingly quiet. I watch my feet, counting my steps, until we reach the front (962 steps) and I shuffle out through the door as he holds it open for me, I lose my balance for a moment, but Hajime catches me and lifts me enough that I can put myself back on my feet. His eyes narrow slightly, brows curve upward, forehead crinkles a little, but he says nothing. I quickly pull myself off of him, shoving slightly and he takes a step back and watches me move forward into the darkened night.

It’s empty out here. Empty of sounds, of people, of everything but the grass and the gravel and the cold morning air. I walk in the grass as Hajime meanders beside me on the gravel path.

We reach the park (603 steps) without again uttering a word to each other. He knows that I can’t read him anymore, so when he’s feeling something he doesn’t want me to be a part of, all he has to do is not say anything. Which isn’t fair, but I suppose none of this is, really.

I plop myself in the grass and start fidgeting with the blades, their waxy texture slipping along my fingers as I run them along the surface. I start plucking them out one by one, tossing them aside. Hajime sinks down next to me.

“How are you doing?”

“Shitty, Hajime. For fucks sake, I’m doing really fucking awful.” There’s no anger in my words, no emotion at all, at least none injected with purpose. For sentiments so pointed, they reach my own ears dull, meaningless.

I hear his breath catch, but he forces it out. “That’s understandable.”

“God, Hajime, can you talk to me like I don’t know what you’re thinking? Because I don’t. I can’t read you anymore.” I find myself laughing. What for?

He waits for me to stop, for the silence to mend itself around us so he can break it again. “I’m worried about you. You’re more impulsive, and you don’t want to leave the room or see anyone. You don’t eat most of the food they give you, as if you weren’t wasting away enough before—”

“Nothing tastes good.”

“Hanamura’s the top chef in Japan.”

“I said what I fucking said, Hajime.”

He continues. “Have you showered recently? Brushed your teeth? Taken your medication? Do you know what day it is?”

I just tune in more tightly to the silent snap of the grass as I pull on each green strand.

“Ko, the medication is supposed to put this off, make the symptoms less severe, make the delusions better, make—”

“I’m not delusional, Hinata.”

The air seems colder. He doesn’t fight me, just pauses, letting his voice soften.

I sigh. “I know it’s coming, Hajime. I can’t do anything about it. Why should I try putting it off?”

“I don’t want you to go,” he says, coolly. “I know that probably doesn’t mean much to you now, but there was a time when it would have.”

“I… I remember that. I know that.” But I don’t tell him I can’t bring myself to care. Guess there’s still some part of me that, residually, knows that all that would do is hurt him. Somehow, he’s the only one who gets that exemption. All the other Remnants, the Future Foundation members, get the worst of me, no holds barred. But there’s got to be some part of me left that has kept Hajime apart from all of that.

He lets out a heavy breath, like he’d been holding it for far too long, so long that it became more painful than what he was thinking. “I know you’re going to die. Soon. I know that. But I wish I could have _you_ for as long as I could, and not this… this version of you.”

“They’re both me. Everything. All of it is me. It’s my brain, my words, my voice.” My own body, betraying me. All of it is me.

“_I know!” _he shouts suddenly, his voice reverberating back to us from the trees, as if a thousand small monsters sit huddled in the underbrush whispering, repeating, echoing. “I know it’s you, but it’s not the you that you deserve to be!” His voice falls a little, pleading. “Don’t you get that? Can’t you understand? Can’t you stop this, please?”

“No,” I mutter. No, I don’t, no I can’t, no I don’t want to. I watch a dark spot appear on my sleeve. Tears. I’m crying. My body starts to shake. My fingers hesitate over a blade of grass, and I’m unable to grab it, to rip it out, to break it, to end it. My voice starts to waiver, the world blurring around me. “No, I don’t understand, Hajime. I can’t. I’m sure I could have, at some point, but I don’t now and that’s not going to change. It’s never going to change. I’m never going to be that me again. I’m already here, half of a person, the emotions and understanding pulled out like, like stuffing from my head. There are barely any pieces of it left, everything else is just _empty, _gaps and spaces where things should be, where I know they should be, where I remember them being, but I can’t fill them back up.” My voice climbs, wavers, breaks. I look over at him, and through my own tears I see him crying too. “Hajime, there’s nothing of me left.”

He kisses me. There’s no desire, just desperation. But still, his hands cup my face and he slips them into my hair, letting them get caught in the knots. I sit there with my eyes open, staring at his face so close to mine, _touching _mine, and I can feel my body reacting, my brain slowly swelling like a dam bulging before it breaks.

He pulls back and opens his eyes, registers the surprise, and lets his hands drop.

“I—I—” I stutter. Bulging. Cracking. Breaking.

His eyes drop, to the ground, a pile of severed green heads at our fingertips, an army of green around them.

I remember him kissing me for the first time. Remember how sweet his lips were, how smooth compared to my chapped ones. When I woke from the island simulation, he was the first one I saw. He ran in, grabbed my face, and kissed me. He’d been crying then too, but it was different now. I couldn’t quite conjure in my mind why it was, but part of my brain was screaming at me, shouting at me. I remember so many kisses over the seven years since, though more and more they were emotionless ordeals. Habit.

This was the first time in a long time that I felt something truly resembling life, purpose, _myself, _swimming in my veins. Little white blood cells, fighting off the apathy, the despair. My heart flutters, knowing that I might never feel like this again, never again get the chance.

I lean over and cup his face, kissing him back, closing my eyes and sinking into his familiar lips. I feel his body tense, then relax. I didn’t dare open my eyes, dare to see if he had closed his, didn’t dare to push this moment, this rare moment, out of the focus of my mind for a second.

His hands brush my cheek, leaving a tingling sensation in their wake. I feel him smudge my tears and push in closer. Around us, the night disappeared, the echoing monsters sat silently and watched. I know that this is only a temporary moment, that tomorrow I’ll wake up and yell at Ibuki when she comes to check on me, that I’ll still be unable to swallow Hanamura’s food, that I’ll flush more of Mikan’s pills down the toilet, that I’ll lay awake next to Hajime and feel nothing, but for this moment I feel everything. I know he can’t fix me, but some broken things should just stay as they are.

3 months later.

Frontotemporal dementia, behavioral variant type.

Prognosis: fatal.

Haven’t been able to leave. The room’s too quiet. Too loud. Too quiet?

Whatever.

He holds me. My hand. My body. I curl into him. I say nothing. I can try, nothing happens.

He says nothing.

Weak. Hair in my face. Can’t brush if off. Tickles.

Sick. I feel sick.

I shift, uncomfortable. Wrong. Feels wrong.

He looks at me. “Hey, Ko, what do you need?”

I can’t respond. I just close my eyes. I feel him. His lips. His warmth.

I think. I concentrate. The effort, exhausting.

Frontotemporal dementia. Prognosis: fatal.

What a beautiful place. His lips. His warmth.

Nothing left. Just warmth. His warmth.

I smile.

**Author's Note:**

> I was kind of tired of sex-crazed, #edgy Nagito in fics and decided that I wanted to take his frontotemporal dementia seriously and think about how it would affect his and his life with Hinata. Also, I wanted it to be from his perspective so it was clear that he wasn't just being an OOC douche for the hell of it.
> 
> Some notes about frontotemporal dementia: The work references a subtype of FTD that affects behavior, which is what most aligns with the behaviors that Nagito exhibits throughout the games (though, shocker, the representation of his illness in game is not exactly spot on). In general, bvFTD affects many types of behavior and can result in loss of ability to empathize, to register and respond to emotions, to maintain executive functioning, and an increases tendency towards random, pointless obsessions (reference by his counting of steps and the grass pulling) and delusions. As the disease progresses, it can cause muscle weakness, thinking and speech difficulty, eating and appetite changes, and sometimes even loss of speech.
> 
> I wanted to represent bvFTD as honestly as I could through my research, but I'm no expert so I apologize for any inaccuracies.
> 
> I decided that it would be most accurate to include his death, but I wanted to portray it with a degree of respect, which is why I didn't shift POV or give otherwise unnecessary descriptions of his physical or mental state, only showing what changes occurred in those three months in terms of his abilities. Please respect this.


End file.
